This invention applies to wireless networks with a central base station and a number of terminals. There are several ways that the terminals can share the radio resources of the base station including frequency division multiplexing (FDM) time division multiple access (TDMA) and code division multiple access (CDMA). A special type of FDM known as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has a number of desirable properties including the ability to handle large capacity networks and good spectral efficiency. The major problem with OFDM is that it requires a large amount of digital signal processing hardware to implement, which makes OFDM more costly and power consuming than other types of multiple access. This invention is an adaptation of OFDM where only the base station requires the complex OFDM hardware. The terminals use much simpler hardware, which makes them less expensive and more power efficient.